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InHigh Tech and High Touch, James E. Coverdill and William Finlay invite readers into the dynamic world of headhunters, personnel professionals who acquire talent for businesses and other organizations on a contingent-fee basis. In a high-tech world where social media platforms have simplified direct contact between employers and job seekers, Coverdill and Finlay acknowledge, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified candidates. However, the authors demonstrate that headhunters serve a valuable purpose in bringing high-touch search into the labor market: they help parties on both sides of the transaction to define their needs and articulate what they have to offer. As well as providing valuable information for sociologists and economists,High Tech and High Touchdemonstrates how headhunters approach practical issues such as identifying and attracting candidates; how they solicit, secure, and evaluate search assignments from client companies; and how they strive to broker interactions between candidates and clients to maximize the likelihood that the right people land in the right jobs.

Finding the Best and Brightest proposes an approach to choosing leaders based on a set of criteria designed to align individual qualities with organizational or institutional goals. Peg Thoms challenges the popular trend in theory and practice toward transformational or visionary leadership, arguing instead that leadership must be developed in context; many organizations, for example, don't need visionaries as much as they need operational leaders, who get things done by focusing on present-day tasks, such as designing superior products and delivering exceptional customer service. This book provides guidance for how to recruit, select, and retain the right people for leadership positions at any level of the organization. Drawing from research conducted in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, Thoms features powerful examples of effective and ineffective leadership in a variety of situations, and sheds light on the complex relationships between leaders and those who follow them. We all choose our leaders. We hire them to run our companies. We vote them into office. We appoint them to committees. We decide to work for, serve, and follow them. In fact, all leadership is relative; by taking direction or orders, going to bat or war, marching behind, listening, and agreeing, we are choosing to allow another individual to lead us. Whether the stage is a corporation, a country, a club, a school, or any other organization, effective leaders matter. Yet despite such high-profile examples of leadership disasters—from the California recall of Gray Davis to the fall of such business titans as Ken Lay and Sam Waksal—we continue to choose, hire, and elect poor leaders. Finding the Best and Brightest explores this phenomenon in business, politics, and other sectors of society, and proposes an antidote—an approach to choosing leaders based on a set of criteria designed to align individual qualities with organizational or institutional goals. Peg Thoms challenges the popular trend toward transformational leadership, which focuses on identifying universal characteristics, arguing instead that leadership must be developed in context. Many organizations, for example, need operational leaders who can focus on present-day tasks, such as designing superior products and delivering exceptional customer service, and not inspirational or visionary leaders, whose otherwise admirable qualities might be ill-suited to the challenges at hand. Outlining six typical leadership search scenarios—from school principal to hospital CEO—Thoms shows readers how to identify the traits and behaviors that are most essential for the position and how to structure interviews and other search techniques to elicit the most informative responses and home in on the best candidates. She also reminds us that many organizations fail not because they can't find good leaders but because they can't keep them, and offers strategies to promote leadership development. Whether you are an executive giving the nod to a new department head, a concerned citizen casting your vote for a municipal councilman, a club member choosing a new president, or an aspiring leader deciding which offer will provide the greatest growth opportunities, Finding the Best and the Brightest offers fresh insights on the dynamic relationship between leaders and those who follow them.

The Presidential power of appointment stems from Article II of the Constitution which provides the power to: \"appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and counselors, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers whose appointments are not herein provided for, and which shall be established by law.. ,\"1 Under that very broad authority and in conjunction with specific legislative requests, the President now appoints all of the full time executives. Marver Bernstein of the Bookings Institution in his book, The Job of the Federal Executive, points out that the demanding nature of most of these jobs requires a high order of managerial skill.2 Many other researchers have confirmed that the days of political patronage except in a minority of these jobs, is near an end.3 Realizing these two conditions, a large number of executives needed, and professional and executive demanded, every President must organize in his own way to solve this problem. Kennedy Organization Laurin L. Henry in an address before the American Political Science Association in 1967 pointed out that the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations developed the first effective professional recruiting efforts for any President.4 Traditionally, a President assuming office has set up task forces to find qualified candidates during the transitional period from one administration to the other. While it may have been easy for the recruiter to find all of the right biographical information, he was faced with a difficult task in determining the attitudinal characteristics of individuals who met the biographical qualifications. Since it was assumed that these attitudinal characteristics indicated the executive's ability to succeed, the staff assistant had to make an attempt to get an accurate picture of the applicant's personality.

The number of women cabinet ministers in several African countries has increased recently while remaining small in others. In this exploratory overview, we investigate women's growing presence in cabinets across sub-Saharan Africa, providing a recent ranking for women's cabinet representation. We attempt to determine why some countries have more women ministers than others, comparing generalist versus specialist appointments and normative influences on governments. Further, we seek to determine the impact of more women ministers by investigating substantive and symbolic representation effects. We find that specialist recruitment appears to have created more ministerial opportunities for women than generalist; regional and international norms have contributed to increasing the number of women cabinet ministers in some countries; and there is evidence of substantive and symbolic representation effects of more women in cabinets in some African countries. Finally, we consider areas for future research around women cabinet ministers in Africa.

Why do firms usually make, not buy, their chief executive officers (CEOs)? Public corporations hire their CEOs from within the firm 78% of the time. They do so although earlier studies have found no clear evidence that internal hires perform better than external ones. So why do firms prefer them? Few scholars have focused on this simple question.